Yulia Kalugina, a graduate and employee of Tomsk State University, has become a scholarship holder of the L'OREAL-UNESCO Foundation “For Women in Science”. Yulia Kalugina works at the Department of Optics and Spectroscopy of TSU, and currently she has an internship at the University of Sherbrooke (Canada).

In the application for the contest, participants talked about their research that led to publications in ranked journals. A graduate of the Faculty of Physics, she received a medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences for her scientific work, was a scholarship holder of the Dynasty Foundation, and won in mathematical Olympiads. In 2010, she defended two dissertations simultaneously – a Ph.D. in Tomsk and a Ph.D. at the University of Le Havre (France).

- I've always been interested in how molecules interact, what forces make them be attracted or repelled, and how the properties of the system change with interaction. Her area of research is intermolecular interactions, collisions of molecules and atoms, and changes in their properties at the quantum level. Recently, she plunged into a new topic - the properties of isolated molecules placed in fullerene C60. The results of these studies can be applied in the most relevant areas - from the greenhouse effect and climate models to quantum programming. In addition, our data helps in the interpretation of astrophysical observations, - said Yulia Kalugina.